Time wore on, and Marna grew hectic with anticipation.  Her lips were too red, her breath came too quickly; she intensified herself; and she practiced her quivering, fitful, passionate songs with religious devotion.  So many things centered around the girl that it was no wonder that she began to feel a disproportionate sense of responsibility.  All of her friends were taking it for granted that she would make a success.

Mrs. Barsaloux was giving a supper at the Blackstone after the performance.  The opera people were coming and a number of other distinguished ones; and Marna was having a frock made of the color of a gold-of-Ophir rose satin which was to clothe her like sunshine.  Honora brought out a necklace of yellow opals whimsically fashioned.

“I no longer use such things, child,” she said with a touch of emotion.  “And I want you to wear them with your yellow dress.”

“Why, they’re like drops of water with the sun in them!” cried Marna.  “How good you all are to me!  I can’t imagine why.”

When the great night came, the audience left something to be desired, both as to numbers and fashion.  Although Marna’s appearance had been well advertised, it was evident that the public preferred to listen to the great stars.  But the house was full enough and enthusiastic enough to awaken in the little Irish girl’s breast that form of elation which masks as self-obliteration, and which is the fuel that feeds the fires of art.

Kate had gone with the Fulhams and they, with Blue-eyed Mary and Dr. von Shierbrand, sat together in the box which Mrs. Barsaloux had given them, and where, from time to time, she joined them.  But chiefly she hovered around Marna in that dim vast world back of the curtain.

They said of Marna afterward that she was like a spirit.  She seemed less and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight.  Her laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness.  She sang with a young Italian who responded exquisitely to the swift, bright, unsubstantial beauty of her acting, and whom she seemed fairly to bathe in the amber loveliness of her voice.

Kate, quivering for her, seeming indefinably to be a part of her, suffering at the hesitancies of the audience and shaken with their approval, was glad when it was all over.  She hastened out to be with the crowd and to hear what they were saying.  They were warm in their praise, but Kate was dissatisfied.  She longed for something more emphatic—­some excess of acclaim.  She wondered if they were waiting for more authoritative audiences to set the stamp of approval on Marna.  It did not occur to her that they had found the performance too opalescent and elusive.